And This Is Us 2023

Artists: Benedikt Ackermann, Offert Albers, Rashiyah Elanga, Anita Esfandiari, Pia Ferm, Lisa-Sophie Gehrmann, Jenny Sofie Kasper, Ramon Keimig, Meret Kern, Nassim L’Ghoul, Sonja Rychkova

Curated by Franziska Nori.

For the exhibition And This is Us 2023, 11 young artists have moved into the Frankfurter Kunstverein. In the weeks leading up to the exhibition opening, they worked and in part set up their temporary workshops in our spaces. New large-format works were created in the process, specifically conceived for the exhibition venue and show. Symbolising the diversity of current art production in Frankfurt, they paint a picture of the questions and issues that young people pose to society.

All the artists invited to participate in this year’s exhibition are studying at, or have just graduated from, the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. They represent a current generation that has been shaped by years of isolation and is in search of new structures and models, away from normative social rules and expectations that it seems have disappointed them.

The exhibition concept allows for the many voices of the artists. The focus is less on an overarching theme, rather on accompanying the participants in the conception and execution of their own themes to enable them to produce new works at an institutional level. The result is a tour that lives from the diversity of the artists, their artistic positions and preoccupations. 

It concerns 11 different, personal perspectives, varied experiences and narratives. And it concerns their view, how they read the reality they experience and transform it pictorially, how they create new contexts of meaning and thus shift discourses. Young artists were always the seismographs of their time—and still are.

For us viewers, their works of art are opportunities to look absorbedly, a chance temporarily to leave aside our own perspective and take on that of another person.

This overview show of current art production from Frankfurt and the Rhine-Main region is curated and produced by the Frankfurter Kunstverein every two years. Taking place for the fourth time since 2017, it offers local artists a stage for their works with a visibility reaching beyond the region. The And This is Us exhibition format at the Frankfurter Kunstverein is now part of a uniquely dense and lively cultural landscape in Germany, where numerous internationally renowned academies and universities train the new generations of artists. We wish to thank the professors of the art academies in Frankfurt and Offenbach for the exchange of ideas and their ongoing support.

The exhibition format has been generously supported from the beginning by the Dr. Marschner Foundation, whose commitment arose from the vision of one Frankfurt citizen determined to maintain a vibrant cultural life for the people of our city reaching out into the future.